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The Country Doctor-Part7_Honore de Balzac(1799-1850)_Translated Works(翻译文学)-第2页

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engaged him as secretary to the mayor; as it happened, I was lucky



enough to find a wife for him, and his dreams of happiness were

fulfilled.



"Both of these new families needed houses, as well as the basket-maker

and twenty-two others from the cretin village, soon afterwards twelve



more households were established in the place. The workers in each of

these families were at once producers and consumers. They were masons,



carpenters, joiners, slaters, blacksmiths, and glaziers; and there was

work enough to last them for a long time, for had they not their own



houses to build when they had finished those for other people?

Seventy, in fact, were build in the Commune during my second year of



office. One form of production demands another. The additions to the

population of the township had created fresh wants, hitherto unknown



among these dwellers in poverty. The wants gave rise to industries,

and industries to trade, and the gains of trade raised the standard of



comfort, which in its turn gave them practical ideas.

"The various workmen wished to buy their bread ready baked, so we came



to have a baker. Buckwheat could no longer be the food of a population

which, awakened from its lethargy, had become essentially active. They



lived on buckwheat when I first came among them, and I wished to

effect a change to rye, or a mixture of rye and wheat in the first



instance, and finally to see a loaf of white bread even in the poorest

household. Intellectual progress, to my thinking, was entirely



dependent on a general improvement in the conditions of life. The

presence of a butcher in the district says as much for its



intelligence as for its wealth. The worker feeds himself, and a man

who feeds himself thinks. I had made a very careful study of the soil,



for I foresaw a time when it would be necessary to grow wheat. I was

sure of launching the place in a very prosperousagricultural career,



and of doubling the population, when once it had begun to work. And

now the time had come.



"M. Gravier, of Grenoble, owned a great deal of land in the commune,

which brought him in no rent, but which might be turned into corn-



growing land. He is the head of a department in the Prefecture, as you

know. It was a kindness for his own countryside quite as much as my



earnest entreaties that won him over. He had very benevolently yielded

to my importunities on former occasions, and I succeeded in making it



clear to him that in so doing he had wroughtunconsciously for his own

benefit. After several days spent in pleadings, consultation, and



talk, the matter was thrashed out. I undertake的过去式">undertook to guarantee him

against all risks in the undertaking, from which his wife, a woman of



no imagination, sought to frighten him. He agreed to build four

farmhouses with a hundred acres of land attached to each, and promised



to advance the sums required to pay for clearing the ground, for

seeds, ploughing gear, and cattle, and for making occupation roads.



"I myself also started two farms, quite as much for the sake of

bringing my waste land into cultivation as with a view to giving an



object-lesson in the use of modern methods in agriculture. In six

weeks' time the population of the town increased to three hundred



people. Homes for several families must be built on the six farms;

there was a vast quantity of land to be broken up; the work called for



laborers. Wheelwrights, drainmakers, journeymen, and laborers of all

kinds flocked in. The road to Grenoble was covered with carts that



came and went. All the countryside was astir. The circulation of money

had made every one anxious to earn it, apathy had ceased, the place



had awakened.

"The story of M. Gravier, one of those who did so much for this



canton, can be concluded in a few words. In spite of cautious

misgivings, not unnatural in a man occupying an official position in a



provincial town, he advanced more than forty thousand francs, on the

faith of my promises, without knowing whether he should ever see them



back again. To-day every one of his farms is let for a thousand

francs. His tenants have thriven so well that each of them owns at



least a hundred acres, three hundred sheep, twenty cows, ten oxen, and

five horses, and employs more than twenty persons.



"But to resume. Our farms were ready by the end of the fourth year.

Our wheat harvest seemed miraculous to the people in the district,



heavy as the first crop off the land ought to be. How often during

that year I trembled for the success of my work! Rain or drought might






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